Nothing
by paintedpinkpuffs
Summary: Sasuke contemplates his ceiling, his classmates and Naruto on a quiet weekend afternoon, as the line between something and nothing starts to blur. SasuNaru, school AU; takes place in the Bell Liberty universe.


A/N: This is an AU story that takes place in the same universe as A Day at Bell Liberty. Like that story, there are a lot of characters from a lot of series making cameo appearances in this one-shot, but it's mostly about Sasuke and Naruto, which is why it's not posted in the crossover section. Light Sasuke x Naruto; some sidelined original characters. Enjoy.

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**Nothing**

There were two different colors of paint on Sasuke's ceiling.

Sasuke didn't spend a lot of time looking at it, which was probably why he hadn't noticed the irregularity before. He thought he probably didn't even care. But from where he was lying on the bed, flat on his back with one hand resting under his head, there wasn't much else to look at.

Sasuke moved one foot against his dark blue comforter, digging his toes into a crease in the heavy fabric. It was a discreet line, the division between eggshell and pearl over his head, but definitely visible under careful scrutiny. Sasuke hadn't noticed any other place in the school with paint uniformity problems, but that honestly didn't surprise him—his room, small by Bell Liberty standards (though that didn't mean much) and jammed between Achilles' and Kirihara's, had often struck him as an architectural afterthought.

He wondered momentarily what Achilles would have done with an extra fifteen feet of space. Installed a bigger TV, maybe—if that were even possible.

It was one of those days at Bell Liberty. One of those days when there were only two options: venture out and wind up in some kind of trouble, or stay in and stare at the ceiling. After Neji had jumped down his throat at breakfast for tracking an insane amount of dirt into the foyer, which he couldn't have done since he hadn't been out of the building in a day and a half, he'd decided the ceiling wasn't so bad.

Actually, the only really unfortunate thing about the ceiling was that its dual tone reminded Sasuke of a particularly lousy Christmas present he'd given his mother one year when he was about seven—Izumi and Itachi had taken him to a shop where you could paint your own pottery, and he'd created a mockery of concentric circles on what was probably an oversized soap dish. It was bad enough that each larger circle, in colors that really had nothing pleasant to say to each other, had gotten progressively more lopsided and imperfect, the last one sporting an ugly, cancerous bulge—but the real embarrassment came when Jennifer had moved the abomination into his father's home office to hold his pens. The only blessing was that Saito kept it well-enough stocked that the colors never showed through. Izumi, wise beyond his years at fourteen, had the sense to just paint five identical soup bowls the exact same color. Sasuke wished occasionally that he'd had that kind of forethought.

He couldn't remember what Itachi had painted.

The rattle of keys in his door pulled Sasuke out of his thoughts just in time, and he sent a silent thank-you toward the unstoppable Bluebell and his illegally copied key stumbling freely through the doorway. His gratitude withdrew into a wince a moment later when Naruto kicked off his dirt-encrusted sneakers (possibly the real culprits?) in two thoughtless directions, one of them bursting with a cloud of dust against the mini refrigerator while the other slid under his couch. Sasuke sighed.

"Is it that hard to just take them off by the door?" he asked, not for the first time.

Two bright blues eyes whipped around to find him, and Naruto grinned, shucking his socks off at least more or less on top of the doormat. "Hey, Sasuke!" he called, utterly missing the reproach, as usual. "Man, is it hot out there!"

Sasuke took in at a glance the damp shoulders of Naruto's t-shirt and the drops of water clinging to his golden hair, hoping that was all they were. "You were outside?"

"Yeah. I was playing soccer with Kamio and Shinji. Well, Shinji didn't want to play, but Kamio dragged him into it, 'cause there were only four of us and he wanted to be on Psyche's team. It didn't work out for him, though." Naruto moved out of the sparse living room and hopped up onto the edge of Sasuke's bed, the mattress bouncing a little beneath them as he settled into his seat. "You'd never guess, but Psyche's got a leg like a cannon. I swear she's had professional training. I've never run that hard in my life."

"So go take a shower," Sasuke urged, prodding Naruto's arm with the back of his hand. Naruto laughed.

"No need. I dumped my whole water bottle over my head, and Kamio's, too." The blond shook his head something like a dog, and water—if that's what it was—flew in all directions; Sasuke couldn't help the way his nose wrinkled as the flurry of drops peppered his gray shirt. "See?" the blond pressed. "All clean."

Sasuke had his serious doubts about that. If lethargy on the level of Shikamaru's usual prerogative hadn't been infecting him since noon, he would have pushed the point. But Naruto's obliviously stubborn smile made the prospect uninviting, so he settled for a deep sigh, withdrawing his hand to push scraps of black hair away from his eyes.

"Just keep your feet off the bed, okay?"

"Okay, okay," Naruto grumbled. Sasuke thought it was a half-hearted grumble at best, a theory confirmed when the Bluebell's smile reappeared mere moments later. "So—whatcha been doing?"

Sasuke shrugged with one shoulder, lifting his eyes to the ceiling again. "Nothing really."

"Nothing, huh? That sounds boring. You should've come out and played with us. Maybe that'd put a smile on your face." One of his hands shot out in the direction of Sasuke's mouth, but Sasuke caught it long before it got there, accustomed by now to the cues that his expression was about to be manually rearranged.

"Stop."

Naruto stuck out his tongue. "You're no fun." Then he flopped back onto the bed with half-spread arms, his head landing on Sasuke's stomach, the mattress echoing his movement underneath their perpendicular forms.

Sasuke winced. "What are you doing?"

Naruto glanced back at him, tangles of blond hair interfering with his eyes. "What? Nothing."

"You're all wet," Sasuke accused mildly, gesturing with his chin toward the damp splotches already seeping into his t-shirt. Naruto blew his bangs out of his face, kicking his feet against the thick cream carpeting in mindless rhythm.

"It's just water."

Sasuke wondered if Naruto's post-game shower had really been as effective as he claimed. He didn't particularly want his shirt wet either way. But Naruto was already down, and the way his neck and shoulders were warm—he always seemed to be warm somehow, even when he hadn't been out in the July sun—was kind of a nice feeling in contrast to the air conditioning, so Sasuke let it go again, his eyes inexplicably drawn back to the line on the ceiling.

He hated to do it, but the more Sasuke thought about it, the more he realized he might have to put in a request to get the ceiling painted over. That was always a pain, not least of all because how quickly Achilles got around to fixing something had a lot to do with how inconvenient it was for Achilles to have it broken. But now that he'd noticed the flaw, Sasuke wasn't sure he'd be able to overlook it anymore.

And now he couldn't get that painting trip out of his head, either. He could picture Izumi's deep forest green bowls, the movement of his oldest brother's paintbrush as he patiently recoated their rims—and his own abomination was burned into his memory. But it bothered him that he couldn't put a third piece in the picture.

The wind lifted outside, blowing the cord for the blinds over his head, and Sasuke swatted at it, his motion and the breeze rearranging Naruto's hair on his shirt like lines of loose straw. Why hadn't he been copying Izumi? He'd done a lot of copying when he was younger. The only person he'd liked imitating better than Izumi was Itachi—but he couldn't put a multicolored paintbrush in Itachi's hand. It was just unimaginable.

"Hey, Sasuke. What're you thinking about?"

Sasuke blinked the memories away and glanced down to meet Naruto's eyes—eyes that were studying him with wide-open curiosity, the lines of his face displaying, as always, every hint of emotion beating inside him. Sasuke knew his own face was more opaque than that; he pushed himself back into the present with a slow shrug, swallowing the thoughts he didn't want to have—at least not while Naruto was around to see them.

"Nothing. You?"

Naruto shrugged back. "Nothing, I guess."

Naruto wasn't a quiet thinker—after three years, Sasuke knew that, at least. He also knew how easy it was to knock the blond's thoughts loose. The Snapdragon rolled his hip to one side, knowing that the motion would prod his friend in the back, and waited for those bright blue eyes to come back to his before arching an eyebrow. An invitation Naruto understood by now, and usually took.

"I was wondering what kind of bug made that big splotch on your ceiling," he said, lifting a hand to point it out.

Sasuke followed the line of his finger, remarking to himself how strange it was that, after half an hour of staring at the ceiling, he hadn't registered the smudge. "Black fly," he remembered after a moment.

Naruto wrinkled his nose. The expression made his face more childlike somehow, an impression strengthened for Sasuke as the blond scooted over a little against his stomach, as though to be out of range if the fly corpse came tumbling down. "You didn't wipe it off after you killed it?"

"Actually, I didn't kill it. Gaara did."

Naruto turned all the way around at that, bracing himself on one elbow so that he could stare at Sasuke without sitting up. "_Gaara_ did? How? When?"

"Last week, when Neji took the Bluebells to that special service seminar on the Hyuuga estate in Puerto del Reyes," Sasuke replied, smirking a little as he pinched Naruto's ear gently between two fingers. "From which you still have a sunburn, by the way."

"I don't sunburn. I tan," Naruto said, swatting at his hand. "But seriously—what was Gaara doing in here? I thought you guys had some kind of police/criminal non-interference treaty."

Sasuke rolled his eyes, both at the concept and at the words Naruto had undoubtedly picked up from a movie somewhere. "It's not a treaty. It's just a good idea. He didn't come to see me, anyway. He was looking for Achilles."

"Well, where was he?" Naruto asked, relaxing enough from his surprise to drop his head back down against Sasuke's shirt. He shifted onto his side to get more comfortable, and the move pushed a lock of his golden hair into a messy loop beside his forehead, setting his expression of rapt attention a little off-kilter.

"He went home for a few days," Sasuke said. He had the split-second inclination to reach out and straighten Naruto's hair, but he held it back, curling the fingers of his free hand into a loose fist.

"'Cause Neji was away?" Naruto asked with a snicker.

"Or because Keita was home," Sasuke countered, wishing momentarily that he couldn't say he knew where Keita was at any given moment. "Anyway, apparently Gaara'd been sent to relay Shikamaru's notes on the last Daisy room inspections—they're all supposed to be looked over by two dorm heads, and since Neji was out of town…"

Naruto grinned, kicking his feet in a testament to his inexhaustible excitement. "That means Neji didn't get to snoop through them, huh? I bet that tears him up inside."

Sasuke rolled his eyes. "Honestly, if Neji does get his hands on those, he'll probably be pissed. I have a feeling Gaara and I aren't qualified to evaluate the room checks ourselves." It hadn't escaped his notice, either, that he was probably going to get the sharp side of Neji's tongue if it came to the Bluebell head's attention that his signature and not Achilles' was on the Daisy room check forms.

Naruto raised his head a little, his interest piqued. "You and Gaara?"

"I guess what actually happened was, Gaara went looking for Shikamaru and found him with Temari—and since Gaara wanted a favor, she convinced him that if he took care of the room check papers for them, she'd have his name accidentally left off the required attendance list for the botanical gardens field trip next month."

"What's so bad about botanical gardens?" Naruto asked, flicking a piece of lint off of the comforter.

"I didn't ask. Actually, I didn't know any of this until a few days later, when I finally managed to catch Shikamaru." And then Sasuke had only listened to as much of Shikamaru's explanation as was necessary to guess the rest, because Shikamaru was an insufferable storyteller. "All I know is, Achilles left me in charge of middle school Snapdragon business while he was gone, and Gaara wasn't really taking no for an answer. Not that he was in a talkative mood."

"And you were?" Naruto teased, poking him in the stomach. Sasuke edged away from his finger.

"Point being: Gaara and I checked over Shikamaru's notes, he killed the fly, then he left. That's really all there is to the story."

"But why was he in _here_?" Naruto persisted, eyes bright with eternal curiosity. "Back here by your bed?"

Sasuke's brow furrowed. "I don't remember. We… I needed something. A pen, maybe. It wasn't a big deal."

"Did he kill the fly with the room-check papers?" Naruto guessed, his hands fisting in Sasuke's blanket as though waiting on the answer to a much more interesting mystery.

Sasuke lifted his eyebrows. "Back of a screwdriver, actually. I guess he had it in his pocket."

"That's really creepy," Naruto told him. Sasuke nodded.

"Yeah. I thought the screwdriver was a little concerning, too."

"No, not that! Gaara Petrovich! Standing in your room. That's just too weird." Naruto shook his head, upsetting his already tousled hair. "It's like an episode of The Twilight Zone. Or like a really old Humphrey Bogart movie, maybe." The blond's eyes became, if possible, even brighter, and his voice dropped to a dramatic rumble, one Sasuke thought was probably supposed to evoke a twenties-era gangster. "'Hey, Petrovich, what's your shadow doing in my doorway? You looking for trouble?' 'Wouldn't dream of it, Uchiha. I'm here on bizness—_legal_ bizness.'"

Sasuke rolled his eyes. "I never took you for a Bogart fan."

"I'm not really," Naruto said, shrugging. "Hinata has old movie nights sometimes, and Neji dragged me along once or twice. He thinks I should spend more time with other Bluebells, you know." Naruto dug one hand under his cheek and rested it there, bringing his eyes finally level with Sasuke's. "They had their moments, I guess, but they moved really slowly."

It took Sasuke a moment to realize Naruto was talking about the show, not his fellow Bluebells. "Old movies will do that," he replied. Then he thought back on Naruto's imagined scene, and let a small frown slip onto his face, wondering if his companion would notice the smile he could still feel in his eyes. "Wait a minute. Was I a dirty cop in your scenario?"

Naruto rolled his eyes and reached out to shove Sasuke's shoulder, the slight contact knocking his frown loose. "No—you were Bogart. Bogart's never a dirty anything." The blond paused, considering. "Actually, you'd prob'ly make a really great Bogart. You've got the right face for it."

"Black and white?" Sasuke asked, arching an eyebrow.

Naruto grinned in spite of himself. "I was thinking stony and way too serious. But you know, your face is pretty much black and white, too. 'Cause your eyes are really black."

Sasuke wasn't sure what to say to that, especially because the judgment came along with a slight shift that riveted Naruto's eyes to his. It was always hard to think when he was staring into Naruto's eyes, because there was so much to see in them—his whole life, somehow, lying like an open book in those depthless pupils. "Your eyes are really blue," he said at last.

Naruto shook his head. "They're not blue. They're sparkling cerulean," he announced, one hand striking a triumphant pose above his head.

Sasuke scoffed. "Who told you that?"

"Hiroshi."

"Hiroshi says some weird things," Sasuke told him. Naruto laughed.

"Yeah, he does." Then he paused, locking eyes with Sasuke again. "Are they, though?"

Sasuke didn't really have to look at him to answer that.

"Yeah, I guess they are."

Naruto smiled. Sasuke watched him smile for a minute, wondering how that smile could draw everything in the blond's face into a perfect summer reflection, even when his hair was wet and tangled and he was lying on his side like this, his eyes partially closed under the force of his grin. Then Sasuke turned his eyes back to the ceiling, because there was only so long that he could hold eye contact with his best friend before it started to feel awkward, and he didn't want Naruto to leave, or even to move, at least not much.

"Hey, Sasuke. You've got two kinds of paint on your ceiling."

The Snapdragon glanced down to see that Naruto's gaze had followed his to the anachronism on the ceiling, and then he nodded, the motion almost imperceptible against his pillow. "I noticed."

Naruto laughed out loud. "That totally reminds me of something I did at Jiraiya's house… oh, man, that was such a disaster."

Sasuke prodded the blond with his hip again, but Naruto didn't need much encouragement—he had rolled back to look at Sasuke and was grinning from ear to ear, tugging on one sleeve of his slowly drying t-shirt.

"It must have been right after I started living with him. Jiraiya was trying to be nice, so he said I could paint my room any color I wanted, and we went and bought this really _outstanding_ orange paint…" Naruto threw his arms as wide as his half-curled body allowed, laughing at his own memory. "I mean, completely out of control—like, safety cone orange. Jiraiya got a lighter shade of orange, too, like Creamsicle orange—I don't know, maybe he was going to use it on the ceiling or something. Anyway, we'd only been at it like three hours or so when he got a call that he had to go on this business trip all of a sudden. He told me to leave it all alone, you know, 'til he got back—but I didn't want to wait."

Sasuke found himself smiling—probably because Naruto was smiling, and his smiles were unstoppably infectious. He wondered if Naruto knew that about himself.

"So after he left," Naruto continued, kicking his feet mindlessly in the air, "I got all the paint out again—I bet he wished he hadn't taught me how to open it first thing. I didn't know what to do with the second orange—I mean, we'd barely started with the first color. But I wanted to use it, you know, since it was there…" Naruto shook his head, his laughter bouncing around in Sasuke's rib cage. "So I just painted this big line up and down on the wall, and everything on the one side got safety cone orange, and everything on the other side got Creamsicle. I even painted the closet doors half and half." Naruto settled back slowly against Sasuke's stomach, reveling in his grin. "When Jiraiya came home two days later, I swear his eyeballs popped out of his head."

"Was he mad?" Sasuke asked.

"On the inside, I'm sure he was pissed," Naruto replied. "He had to replace half the carpeting in that room—and all the way to the garage, too, 'cause I wasn't so good at putting the paint cans away. But he felt so bad about leaving that he didn't say anything."

Sasuke found himself reaching out toward Naruto's face, not sure even as he moved his hand what he intended to do with it. He settled for flicking a lingering drop of water from the tip of one of his golden bangs. Naruto watched it fall with him. "Did you paint over it?" Sasuke asked.

That made Naruto smile again. "What? No way. That was my first masterpiece. I wouldn't let him do anything to it. It still looks like that." The boy chuckled a little. "Come to think of it, though, he didn't let me help with the redecorating much after that."

Sasuke considered his companion in silence for a moment, the line on the ceiling just registering in his periphery, far too clearly for the minor discrepancy between its colors. Then he adjusted his position against the pillows, letting the movement draw Naruto's eyes back to his face.

"There's this place we should go sometime. I think you'd like it."

"Yeah?" Naruto prompted.

"They let you paint dishes and things however you want. My… my family used to go there sometimes."

He wondered, for a moment, if Naruto was going to notice his stumble, the unnatural pause where he'd tripped over how to characterize the moment that had been so stuck in his mind all afternoon. But the blond's attention had been caught much earlier than that, and he pulled his knees farther onto the bed, scrunching up against Sasuke's side in his excitement.

"That sounds awesome! What kinda stuff can you paint? Like, just dishes, or is there other stuff, too?"

Sasuke shrugged. "A lot of kinds of ceramics. It's hard to describe. I haven't been there in a while, but I'm pretty sure it's still in the same place."

Naruto was nodding right along with him, his eyes almost glowing in the wide-open lines of his face. "Yeah, let's go! That sounds great. Maybe we could get some other people to go, too." Sasuke nodded vaguely—but that wasn't enough of an answer, if Naruto reaching up to shake his arm was any indication. "I mean it—let's go this weekend. We can get there on the bus, right?"

Sasuke blinked. "I think so."

Naruto grinned. "Cool. It's a plan, then," he finished, holding out his little finger.

Sasuke wondered why Naruto sometimes said 'plan' when he meant 'promise.' He hooked his finger around the blond's without thinking it over too much. "It's a plan," he echoed.

"Yes. This is going to be so awesome. I can't wait," Naruto told him, his whole body practically humming with excitement.

Sasuke shook his head, amazed, not for the first time, that Naruto had somehow managed to keep hold of a level of energy and wonder the Snapdragon had really only otherwise seen in kindergarteners. But today, unlike most days, he didn't comment, because in a way he couldn't wait to go back, either—to go back with Naruto and make a new memory, instead of the one that had been floating, tainted and incomplete, on his bisected ceiling. Naruto settled back against his stomach and Sasuke thought to himself that he wouldn't mind remaking almost every memory he had with Naruto, letting Naruto paint his indomitable smile over them all—even if that paint came in two chaotic colors of orange. Sasuke smiled to himself as he looked up at the ceiling again, this time trying to imagine a six-year-old Naruto with a massive paintbrush, orange caked in his golden hair and across his face, putting his colors up on the world with reckless abandon, like he always did. That was an image worth keeping. An image that was probably even worth keeping the line.

"Hey, Sasuke."

Sasuke glanced down at his companion, somewhat quieter now after a minute of mutual silence. Naruto shifted and stretched out a few inches, his bent knees resting close to Sasuke's head. Sasuke glanced at them long enough to make sure that the blond's feet were still in the air.

"Hm?"

"You know I can feel you breathing?" Naruto readjusted his cheek against his friend's shirt, searching, Sasuke thought, for the strongest instance of movement. "You breathe really slowly. Like a Zen master."

Sasuke rolled his eyes. "I'm not a Zen master. I'm just relaxed."

"Oh." Naruto blinked once, his shoulders slumping into the midnight blue comforter. "Me, too."

Sasuke scoffed under his breath. "You never relax."

"Sure, I do!" Naruto protested, with far too much fire for someone in the process of relaxing. "'Cause I'm breathing slowly, too." Five tan fingers snaked out to find Sasuke's free hand, and Naruto pulled it toward himself, settling it in the center of his chest. "See? I'm totally relaxed."

Although Naruto closed his eyes and pressed his lips together to aid in the illusion, he couldn't be that relaxed, Sasuke decided—even more than a breath, he could feel Naruto's heartbeat in his hand, and the wrinkles of concentration littering the blond's forehead were a little telling, too. It was all right with him. He felt Naruto's heart beating against his palm and studied Naruto's earnest face and the crumple that their bodies had become—a closed circuit now, an imperfect but complete circle. For how strange a shape they had become together, Sasuke couldn't help feeling it was one of the most comfortable positions he'd ever found.

"Hey." Sasuke glanced back to find that Naruto's eyes were open, watching him with equal parts confusion and curiosity, an almost spellbinding expression in bright blue. "What're you smiling about?"

"Nothing," Sasuke said. Because it was nothing—it was the way that even doing nothing became something special in the right company.


End file.
